https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0924-6982
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ABSTRACT
Perceptual experience is present-directed, in the sense that what we perceptually experience seems to be temporally present, while what we remember or imagine does not. One way of explaining this contrast is to claim that perceptual experience uniquely involves awareness of the property of presence (conceived of either as an observer-independent property of the present time or as a relation of simultaneity between an event and one’s experience of it). I argue against this explanation and in favour of one on which perception’s feeling of present-orientation is explained in terms of the feeling of aptness for action guidance that characterizes perceptual experience. I argue that an advantage of this view is that, unlike its rivals, it can make perception’s present-directedness straightforwardly compatible with the specious present theory as an account of experiences of motion and change.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 On this point, I agree with Hoerl [Citation2009, Citation2018] and Kriegel [Citation2015].
2 For related proposals linking presence with action, see Grush [Citation2005] and Matthen [Citation2005, Citation2010].
3 For a detailed defence of a related proposal relating perceptual attention and ‘selection for action’, see Wu [Citation2014].
4 One reason why I emphasize this distinction is that the role of conscious perception in the control of action is controversial but there is no comparable controversy concerning selection. See, e.g., Goodale and Milner [Citation1992] and Briscoe and Schwenkler [Citation2015].
5 Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.
6 Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting this response.
7 Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.
8 For example, Rashbrook-Cooper characterizes phenomenal temporal presence as the feature of experience that ‘renders actions and now-judgements immediately appropriate’ [Citation2017: 135].
9 For the representationalist about perception (e.g. Harman [Citation1990], Tye [Citation1995], Dretske [Citation1995], and Siegel [Citation2011]), who believes that phenomenal character is constituted by representational content, this claim means that perceptual experiences do not represent the property of temporal presence. For the naive realist (e.g. Campbell [Citation2002], Martin [Citation2002], Brewer [Citation2011], and Logue [Citation2012]), who believes that perceptual experience is a relation of awareness between a perceiver and objects and properties in their environment, it means that temporal presence is not a property that can figure into such relations.
10 An anonymous referee points out that we might also employ a spatial version of this principle in our reasoning about action—namely, that perceptually guided action requires approximate sameness of spatial location between the experience and the experienced object. One challenge for articulating this spatial version of the principle is that the ‘approximate sameness of spatial location’ involved must be quite loose, since we can point to or orient towards things that are quite far away. But something in this vicinity seems correct to me, and potentially capable of explaining (at least in part) the sense in which experienced objects appear spatially present. Interestingly, this view suggests that phenomenal temporal presence and phenomenal spatial presence really come to the same thing—the feeling of action availability characteristic of perception.
11 With that said, we can perceive events whose objective temporal location is in the past, and experiences of such events can guide actions. For example, you might perceive a star that you know burned out years ago. Using your experience of the star to guide actions like pointing doesn’t require that the star is really there in the temporal present. Is this a counterexample to the action coordination principle? We need to be careful about which action is being successfully performed in this case: you succeed at pointing where the star appears to be, but not at the star (which is gone). Nonetheless, I think that the action coordination principle can still explain why the star appears present, since in this case your experience seems to be guiding a successful perceptually guided action on the star. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
12 Another issue is that if we can perceptually experience the property of presence then presumably we can also remember it. This suggests that the representation of the property is insufficient for phenomenal temporal presence (since we can have a memory representation of an event as having had the A-theoretic property, but the memory will lack phenomenal temporal presence). So, the A-theoretic property account requires further refinement.
13 Prosser’s [Citation2016] ‘multi-detector argument’ aims to prove a stronger version of this claim.
14 This view of Kriegel’s is superseded by his later, incompatible [Citation2015] view.
15 Connor and Smith [Citation2019] offer similar criticisms of the B-theoretic property view (the ‘token-reflexive account’, in their terms).
16 This version of the thesis closely follows Harman’s [Citation1990] formulation. The idea can be traced back to Moore’s [Citation1903] remarks about the ‘diaphanousness’ of experience.
17 For defence of the ‘straightforward’ application of the transparency thesis to temporal features, see Tye [Citation2003], Hoerl [Citation2018], and Heeney [Citation2021]. For defence of alternative conceptions of temporal transparency, see Phillips [Citation2010] and Soteriou [Citation2013].
18 Kriegel attempts to reconcile his self-representational view of experience with the transparency thesis, although he does not directly discuss the temporal version [Citation2009a: 182–4].
19 For defence of a ‘snapshot’ conception of experience, see Chuard [Citation2011], Prosser [Citation2016], and Arstila [Citation2018]. For arguments that the snapshot view is inadequate, see Lee [Citation2014], Dainton [Citation2018], and Shardlow [Citation2019].
20 For a review of the history of the concept of the specious present, see Andersen and Grush [Citation2009] and Andersen [Citation2014].
21 See, e.g., Tye [Citation2003], Grush [Citation2005, Citation2007, Citation2016], and Lee [Citation2014]. These authors defend the view that the temporal properties of an experience need not match the temporal properties that the experience represents. I will focus here on a conception of the specious present that rejects the ‘matching thesis’ (the thesis that temporal content must match the temporal features of the experience), although this is by no means universally accepted (see, e.g., Phillips [Citation2010]).
22 For discussion of this issue in the context of debates about presentism (a version of the A-theory on which only present things exist), see Gentry [Citation2021].
23 For helpful feedback and discussion, thanks to Mohan Matthen, Bill Seager, Diana Raffman, Barry Dainton, Michael Miller, Mason Westfall, and Aaron Henry. Thanks also to the audience at the Canadian Philosophical Association where an earlier version of the paper was presented. And thanks to two anonymous referees and the editor Stephen Hetherington for their help in improving the paper.